Infinite Hours
by rikkucheerio
Summary: Post "Untethered" Written for the prompt "What was the longest day of your life?" Spoilers for "Untethered" and "Frame"


The longest day of Robert Goren's life isn't the day his mother passed away. That day seemed to drag on, but eventually came to a close, an ending hidden in the bottom of the whiskey bottle with which he sought refuge from the hours. One could make the argument that the day never really ended and instead just mashed into the next one until her funeral nearly a week later, but to his way of thinking, it was neatly compartmentalized into a series of really long days even though those days were nearly exactly the same. Each day had a start with the sunrise and an end when the sun fell into the Hudson River.

It isn't one of a handful of other days that, at the time, were seemingly without end. It isn't the day he was wounded in Iraq, nor any of the subsequent days he spent healing. It isn't the day his father died, which was comparatively short, though not without its own pains.

It isn't the day Frank was murdered, because like when his mother passed away, each day had a definitive ending that came with the setting sun. The days that followed, the investigation that cast him in a guilty light, inevitably made the hours stretch and bend. The longer his coworkers--people he could call friends if he were in a habit of being social--poked around in his financial records and otherwise did their jobs, he felt the hours become more and more drawn out. The longer people scrutinized him, the more uncomfortable and trapped he felt. Over the course of the investigation, he felt like a prehistoric insect trapped in a bead of amber tree sap, forever stuck in place, unable to do anything except exist as pairs of eyes examine him under a microscope. This feeling of being trapped dragged out the hours until finally, his name had been cleared. The day had an ending, just like all the other days, one that came with the darkness of night.

The longest day of his life is one that doesn't have a definitive ending. The hours he spent in isolation within Tates Correctional Facility blended one into another. There were no markers to guage the passage of time; the day was literally unending. He knows it was more than one calendar day, but he only knows that because the dates on his paperwork jumped forward when he was released back to active duty. He has no cognitive awareness of how much time went by. He thinks of these hours in parts: during and after Heaven.

He only has vague memories of the hours spent in and out of Heaven, unable to recount details, though he tries hard to go a day without remembering at all. Heaven isn't anything like the name suggests. It's a hot room tucked away in a dark part of Tates Correctional Facility and it's home to a passive-aggressive form of torture. Inmates are chained up and locked away for upwards of eighteen hours at a time. The hours tick slowly by, nothing to mark how long he's been in Heaven, and all he has to occupy his mind with are his own thoughts. In reality, time--seconds, minutes, hours--remains at a constant. But in a static environment, time stops. He's unaware of the sun's rising and setting. To him, it's still the same day and it will still be that same day hours later. The whole point of Heaven is to dehydrate and starve inmates into submission. Bodies are robbed of their natural rhythms. He's perpetually aware he's stuck in "now".

Eventually, the corrections officers come in and move him to a cell smaller than some walk-in closets. He's dehydrated and barely aware of his surroundings. Here, time doesn't matter. He's still in the same hours, the same moments, but they're even more blurred in his decompensated state of awareness. He has no grasp of how long he spent in isolation--one hour, half a day, two days.

Even now, almost a year after his time at Tates, he still has moments that drag on like the hours spent within Heaven. When he's alone in the interrogation room, he's unable to stop from remembering. His breath quickens and he starts to feel panicked, trapped like he was in Heaven. He feels stuck in time. His days have a definitive beginning and an end again, but he'll never be able to rid himself of these moments that catch him off guard. They linger like the residual emotional pain, freezing him in place until something kick-starts time for him again.


End file.
